Just in time for the fall semester, the Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Lyceum at Amherst College by Bruner/Cott has opened its doors in Massachusetts. The new building contains Amherst College’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry and Department of History inside a 21,000-square-foot envelope.
Offices, classrooms, and support spaces are scattered throughout the Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Lyceum. As the name suggests, the building was inspired by the Lyceum of ancient Athens, Bruner/Cott said in a statement. It’s attached to a Greek Revival building made of brick and its architecture responds to the existing context as such by meeting its scale, albeit while using forward-looking, sustainable, and contemporary materials.
Amherst College is slated to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. Toward that end, Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Lyceum uses low-carbon features like wood and plant-based materials. It has an all-electric mechanical system and high-powered solar array system on the roof.
The Bruner/Cott-designed ensemble is split up into three conjoined volumes that share a central stair. One volume to the corner is a no fuss box that, on the facade, evokes a masonry post-and-lintel construction system. Another is finished with a more contemporary look thanks to windows with casings. Meanwhile, mass timber beams and joinery were left exposed, revealing the true innards which keep the building upright.
Now that construction has finished, the Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Lyceum will serve as a node in a new budding campus district off of South Pleasant Street.
“The new Lyceum is a place where we’ll gather for dialogue and exchange and to ask difficult questions about what it means to be human,” Amherst College president Michael Elliott said in a statement. “This is the core of what we’ve been doing at Amherst College for over 200 years.”